Early success in the Weimar Republic

The Piscator-Bühne in Berlin (1927–29), formerly known as Neues Schauspielhaus

In collaboration with the writer Hans José Rehfisch, he formed a theatre company in Berlin at the Comedy-Theater on Alte Jacobsstrasse, following the Volksbühne ("people's stage") concept, where in 1922–1923 they staged works by Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Leo Tolstoy.[7] As stage director at the Volksbühne (1924–1927), and later as managing director at his own theatre (the Piscator-Bühne on Nollendorfplatz), Piscator produced social and political plays especially suited to his theories. His dramatic aims were utilitarian — to influence voters or clarify left-wing policies. He used mechanized sets, lectures, movies, and mechanical devices that appealed to his audiences. In 1926, his updated production of Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers at the distinguished Preußisches Staatstheater in Berlin provoked widespread controversy. Piscator cut the text heavily and reinterpreted it as a vehicle for his political beliefs. He presented the protagonist Karl Moor as a substantially self-absorbed insurgent. As Karl's foil, Piscator made the character of Spiegelberg, often presented as a sinister figure, the voice of the working-class revolution. Spiegelberg appeared as a Trotskyist intellectual, slightly reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his cane and bowler hat. As he died, the audience heard The Internationale sung.

Piscator founded the influential (though short-lived) Piscator-Bühne in Berlin in 1927. In 1928 he produced a notable adaptation of the unfinished episodic comic CzechnovelThe Good Soldier Schweik. The dramaturgical collective that produced this adaptation included Bertolt Brecht.[8] Brecht later described it as a "montage from the novel".[9]Leo Lania's play Konjunktur (Oil Boom) premiered in Berlin in 1928, directed by Erwin Piscator, with incidental music by Kurt Weill. Three oil companies fight over the rights to oil production in a primitive Balkan country, and in the process exploit the people and destroy the environment. Weill's songs from this play, like Die Muschel von Margate are still part of the modern repertoire of art music.[10]

In 1929 Piscator published his own work on the theory of theatre, The Political Theatre.[11] In the preface to its 1963 edition, Piscator wrote that the book was "assembled in hectic sessions during rehearsals for The Merchant of Berlin" by Walter Mehring, which had opened on 6 September 1929 at the second Piscator-Bühne.[12] It was intended to provide "a definitive explanation and elucidation of the basic facts of epic, i.e. political theatre", which at that time "was still meeting with widespread rejection and misapprehension."[12] Three decades later, Piscator felt that:

The justification for epic techniques is no longer disputed by anyone, but there is considerable confusion about what should be expressed by these means. The functional character of these epic techniques, in other words their inseparability from a specific content (the specific content, the specific message determines the means and not vice versa!) has by now become largely obscured. So we are still standing at the starting blocks. The race is not yet on ...[13]

International work, emigration and late productions in West Germany

Piscator was theater manager of The Freie Volksbühne Berlin from 1962 until his death.

In 1931, after the collapse of the third Piscator-Bühne, Piscator went to Moscow in order to make the motion picture Revolt of the Fishermen with actor Aleksei Dikiy for Mezhrabpom, the Soviet film company associated with the International Workers' Relief Organisation.[14] As John Willett put it, throughout the pre-Hitler years Piscator's "commitment to the Russian Revolution was a decisive factor in all his work."[15] With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Piscator's stay in the Soviet Union became exile.[16] In July 1936, Piscator left the Soviet Union for France. In 1937, he married dancer Maria Ley in Paris. Bertolt Brecht was one of the groomsmen.

Piscator returned to West Germany in 1951 due to McCarthy era political pressure.[18] He was appointed manager and director of the Freie Volksbühne in West Berlin in 1962. To much international critical acclaim, in February 1963, Piscator premièred Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy, a play "about Pope Pius XII and the allegedly neglected rescue of Italian Jews from Nazi gas chambers."[19] Until his death in 1966, Piscator was a major exponent of contemporary and documentary theatre. Piscator's wife, Maria Ley, died in New York city in 1999.

Impact on theatre

In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructedness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.

Piscator's contribution to theatre has been described by theatre historian Günther Rühle as "the boldest advance made by the German stage" during the 20th century.[21] Piscator's theatre techniques of the 1920s — such as the extensive use of still and cinematic projections from 1925 on, as well as complex scaffold stages — had an extensive influence on European and American production methods. His dramaturgy of contrasts led to sharp political satirical effects and anticipated the commentary techniques of epic theatre.[citation needed]

In the Federal Republic of Germany, Piscator's interventionist theatre model experienced a late second zenith. Several productions trying to come to terms with the Germans' Nazi past and on other timely issues made Piscator the inspirer of a mnemonic and documentary theatre from 1962 on. Piscator's stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace[22] has been played in some 16 countries since 1955, including three productions in New York.[citation needed]

Opening of an exhibition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Erwin Piscator's death, Berlin, 2016

In 1980 a monumental sculpture by Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi was dedicated to Piscator in central London.[23] In the fall of 1985, an Erwin Piscator Award was inaugurated that is annually being awarded in New York, the adopted city of Piscator's second wife Maria Ley. Additionally, a Piscator Prize of Honors has been annually awarded to generous patrons of art and culture in commemoration of Maria Ley since 1996. The host of the Erwin Piscator Award is the international non-profit organisation "Elysium − between two continents" that aims at fostering artistic and academic dialogue and exchange between the United States and Europe. In 2016, a Piscator monument has been raised in his birthplace Greifenstein-Ulm.[24]

^See Brecht's Journal entry for 24 June 1943. Brecht claimed in his Journal entry to have written the adaptation, but Piscator contested that; the manuscript bears the names "Brecht, Gasbarra, Piscator, G. Grosz" in Brecht's handwriting (John Willett. 1978. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917–1933. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996, 110). Brecht wrote another Schweik drama in 1943, Schweik in the Second World War.